FROM MY CORNER

Imploding America?

A friend, a former U.S. Naval pilot who lived several years in a prisoner of war camp decades ago, spoke with me the other day. We discussed the current political state of affairs in America and the world.

Watching the absurd spectacle of the Trump presidency closely as I do, after that talk I got to thinking further about it. I then talked with another friend, who is a well paid professional musician in San Francisco. He and I also discussed the utter absurdity of the Trump phenomenon.

Two things spring to my mind. First, that the poorly educated followers of Trump are indeed some of the most unfortunate financial discards of the American take-no-prisoners mentality of our Corporate world.

They follow a man who can only be called a Trickster, who is methodically helping implode all the values America spent a quarter millennium developing. His programs, further enriching his wealthy friends, will bring his poorer followers little, if any, economic relief.

The second thing springing to mind is that it is largely Veterans, having served America, who truly understand the vital importance of citizens in keeping America intellectually and emotionally together to maintain the integrity of the country and government.

No one, including all us veterans, thinks America is without fault on many fronts. The power of corporate money has sold the entire country on the concept of profit and luxury. We have paid a high ethical and moral price for our allegiance to the pursuit of the dollar.

But it is, in my opinion, predominantly veterans, small business entrepreneurs, and creative artists who keep a sharper vision intact of the necessity for Americans to insure that all citizens, not just the wealthy, own a piece of our economy.

Across our entire country such industries as real estate keep millions of open land off the market specifically to maintain absurdly high prices. This keeps millions of Americans from owning their own homes.

Such greed-inspired mechanisms rule the land. Many millions of acres of Federal and State land could be allocated to low cost housing without damaging our environmental regard for parks and other pristine places.

A newly-awakened regard by corporations and government for the desperate need to address poverty in America is, I am convinced, the key to our country’s economic progress. We cannot let 20 to 30 million Americans remain destitute, often homeless, without jobs, without income, bereft of the basics of life without it eventually bringing the nation to its knees.

This could be handled in America by combining a form of capitalism with a social support system similar to that of other developed countries, Canada, for instance, and most of Western Europe. It is purely a lack of political will on the part of elected officials beholden to the corporate dollar.

Why America has denied our poor such an economic support system rests directly at the feet of political leaders guarding the financial dominance of their corporate campaign donors. Meanwhile, corporate America exhibits the creative political imagination of bulldogs and slugs.

And the American middle class majority remains glued to their TV screens, mesmerized by the present Trump show, as if it were just a Broadway spectacle instead of the saddest days our country has ever experienced.

I keep asking what will it take to break the strangle hold of corporate money in our country and return us to a rational state of affairs that inculcates a sensitivity for people instead of just gross profiteering by the already wealthy?

As one friend said to me lately, it sounds a lot like the state of affairs preceding the fall of ancient Rome. Well, now, that is certainly food for thought, is it not? Maybe that is an answer waiting in the wings for the right time to appear on the political stage.